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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

And 40 years later, after dozens of billions or more spent, someone might just be allowed to finally build an amazingly clunky, drastically bloated up version of it that has been finally approved by a myriad storm of shifting regulations and unhappy contrary interests.

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It's not just the approval process. The late Admiral Rickover may have put it best,

“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

“On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

Could be. But I think reactors suffer from the same "NASA Problem" (and also some dose of second-system syndrome) as rockets

> It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

Correct. That's why you design once and build multiple ones

How did SpaceX manage to get the costs down?

Re-prioritizing is also important. Safety of course should be the main issue. But I suspect most current designs focus too much on efficiency and max power as well.

SpaceX learns by building and failing. Learning to land was using the basically free discarded first stage from various launches paid for by other people. You can't really do that with reactors.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

How would you "bloat up" a reactor that uses passive convection, submerged in millions of gallons of emergency cooling water?

Light Water Reactors aren't the ideal way to generate nuclear energy, but they're proven technology, and it's hard to imagine a safer LWR design than what NuScale is planning.

Which, hopefully, because of all these regulations and bureaucracy, won't have any issues that will cause (again) a meltdown of the public opinion about nuclear reactors. If some serious accident happens with something like this, be prepared to wait another 40 years before anyone dares to propose nuclear energy again.

Though public opinion and regulations might be a barrier too, there's a more elementary and fundamental problem around nuclear: cost and time.

Even France, without the regulatory or public opinion problems, is having difficulty building nuclear, and the construction project at Flamanville is an unmitigated disaster, just exactly the same as the US's recent projects at Vogtle and Summer.

And that's the reason that SMR designs are even being attempted. The design has always been rejected in the past as uneconomical. But with large reactor design proven to uneconomical, and a huge devotion to nuclear among some, SMRs are giving it a go again.

If nuclear worked well, there are always populations that welcome them nearby. Most, but not all, of our current 100GW has supportive neighbors.

But I always find it curious that these lesser problems of public support and regulations get so much more attention than a far more fundamental problem: economic efficiency.

Public opinion does not drive. Cost drives.

Nukes have only ever been built where the cost was substantially or completely absorbed off-budget, typically by taxpayers.

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